stoutfellow

I am going to San Diego to visit my family during the holidays. I booked my flights with - a certain booking site which shall remain nameless.

Since then, they have been bombarding me with e-mail.

Hey, we have discounts on hotels you can stay at!
I'm visiting my family. I will be staying with my brother.

Wanna rent a car? We can get you discounts!
I don't drive. My brother has a car.

Hey, here are some neat things you can do while you're in San Diego!
I'm visiting my family. There will be parties: Christmas parties, birthday parties, and a wedding. There will be trips to the movies: Arrival, Moana, Rogue One. My family and I are quite capable of amusing ourselves.

I can't filter them out, because I need the notifications concerning my flights. But everything else they send me goes straight into the bitbucket.

I'm currently reading Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age, on a recommendation from desert_vixen. I haven't gotten very far yet, but it's been interesting so far. However, I just ran into the following passage.

"Every man should have a lord", proclaimed the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Only the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople were exempt from this stricture, and they were vassals of the Lord.

Um, the Holy Roman Emperor did not sit in Constantinople; that was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire...

Ah, well, I'm not reading the book for political history, but for climatological history.

I'm reading Verne's classic From the Earth to the Moon / Around the Moon. Verne is the prototypical hard-science SF writer (and oh, my, is this text larded with technical details), but I just hit a major mathematical blunder.

The astronauts have passed into the shadow of the moon, and the excitable Ardan is asking what their fate is to be. His (more technically educated) companions respond by discussing orbits (which, of course, Ardan does not understand).

"Just so", replied Barbicane. "With a certain speed it will assume the parabola, and with a greater the hyperbola."

Um, no. There are three options, not two; Barbicane has omitted the ellipse. But, beyond that, there are only two genuine possibilities. Parabolas do not happen. A parabola is a conic whose eccentricity is exactly 1; an ellipse has eccentricity less than 1, a hyperbola, greater. Pick a positive real number at random, using any continuous distribution you like: the probability of getting exactly 1 is literally 0.

But what about Galileo, you may ask? Sadly, the acceleration due to gravity, even close to the surface of the Earth, is not quite constant, and the parabolas his equations predict turn out, in reality, to be arcs of extremely narrow ellipses.

And, of course, all this ignores the fact that the crew is involved in a three-body problem, so Keplerian conics are not in the picture. (Actually, it's at least a four-body problem, since the vessel was diverted slightly by a close encounter with a hypothetical second satellite of Earth.)

Oh, well. Only Hal Clement ever actually got things right.

Today, I was browsing on Wunderground when I saw a reference to "Kellog, Russia". Curious about the name, I googled it. (Was it named, somehow, for the Kellogg of Kellogg-Briand?) Not wishing to read about breakfast cereals, I entered "kellog russia" - and was greeted with a list of references to the cereal company's activity in Russia.

I typed in "kellog" - and was returned to the same page.

I tried again, and got "Results for 'Kellogg'" with the usual "See results for 'Kellog'". I clicked on the latter, and finally got somewhere near where I wanted - but with a querulous "Did you mean 'Kellogg'?"

Would it really be that hard for Google to remove that last bit when someone clicks on "See results for..."?

[Oh, as for the original question, all I found was a Wikipedia stub, with no information about the origin of the name. I thought for a moment I'd glimpsed an explanation, but the local language is "Ket", not "Kel". Grmph.]

The immediate prompt for my changeover to dual-monitor was this: I wanted to be able to use my Skyrim database at the same time that I was playing Skyrim, so that I could enter data and make decisions using the database in real time.

I will be able to do this, but it isn't going to be as clean as I'd hoped. To make it work, I have to run Skyrim in windowed mode (maximum resolution). After starting it, I have to hit C-A-D and bring up the Task Manager; from that point on, I have to use the TM to switch between Skyrim and the database.

Oh, well, I can live with it. The gains are definitely greater than the inconveniences.

I am becoming seriously annoyed with my Kindle.

This is new behavior, only appearing today, but it has become extremely sluggish, responding very slowly to a "next page" tap. After only a few page-turns, the next tap results in Kindle's version of a reboot; it eventually returns to the front page - the list of documents on the machine - but, when I tap on the book I was reading, I am returned to the first page of the chapter, not to the last page I had read. This is happening with PG books and with purchased books. (I'm also getting frequent, unexplained "The selected application could not be started" messages. What application? The "let me read this book" application?)

Does anyone know what could be causing this behavior, and/or what can be done about it? If this keeps up, I may have to switch to a different e-reader.(Everything I have, I have on my home computer, cataloged with Calibre.)

Addendum: And, of course, as soon as I publicly complained, the misbehavior ceased. Still, if anyone has comments to offer, I'd like to hear them, in case of a recurrence.

This week, I bought a sack of bosc pears for my daily fruit. Now, SnS puts little adhesive UPC tags on fruit, which is OK for, say, oranges, but for thin-peel fruit like pears they can be a pain to remove.

Today, I took a pear from the fridge, carefully removed the tag (losing a little of the peel in the process), and washed it under the tap.

That was when I noticed the second tag.

They're even harder to remove when they're wet.

Feeling a bit down today. Yesterday was one of those days that makes early retirement awfully tempting. The college has asked each department to come up - purely hypothetically ;-) - with plans by which they could cut 3, 6, or 9% from their budgets, in anticipation of expected state budget cuts. Also, the state is monkeying around with pension payouts, cutting back from what was promised when we were hired. (Funny: when a struggling company gives a CEO a golden parachute, it's all about "the sanctity of contracts", whereas when state employees ask for the retirement plans they've been paying into and counting on for decades, suddenly it's "greedy suckers at the public tit". Pfeh.)

Fortunately, the rest of the week was the kind that encourages me to stay on. I think I gave pretty good lectures in both History of Math classes this week, and we wrapped up Gauss-Bonnet in the differential geometry class. (Not sure what I'm going to do in that class *next* week, which is the last week of the semester, but I'll think of something. A couple of students have made reasonable suggestions.)

Gah. I may not want to quit, but I could sure use a break - and not one spent flat on my back in a hospital, thankyouverymuch.

This is really starting to rub me the wrong way.

I'm not on Twitter, and can't follow people that way. Still, there are some Twitter accounts that I like to look in on from time to time, and I have them bookmarked in a special folder.

There is at least one such account that misbehaves: if I bookmark it, it will only show tweets up to a certain day - in this case, February 14. If I go to it another way, via the person's website, sometimes I get the more recent tweets and sometimes I don't.

I know for certain that this happens with one particular account, but there are at least two others that I suspect of behaving this way. Does anyone know a) why this happens and b) how to stop it?

There were a number of things I was going to do this afternoon. Most of them, unfortunately, relied on considerable two-handed typing.

Thanks to flight delays, I managed to miss the snowstorm/deep freeze that began last week here. The last day or two have actually been warmish (highs in the 40s F). Unfortunately, the lows have been subfreezing...

allowing the storm to strike from out of the past. On the way to Shop'n'Save this morning, I trod a little uncautiously, and hit a sneaky patch of ice. I took the fall on my left arm, and specifically my left wrist.

This message is about as much typing as my left can handle today. Gonna go soak it now.

:grmph: